Comment 3 for bug 2037584

I ran some tests and this is what I found:

I wasn't exactly right in thinking pkgbinarymangler is stripping debug symbols from our binary. It is dh_strip that is doing that, but on xenial, dh_strip honors the NO_PKG_MANGLE environment variable. However in this case the difference in resulting binary size is negligible (<1kb).

I found two things that pkgbinarymangler is doing for us:

1. it truncates the ubuntu-advantage-tools changelog to the latest 10 entries.
2. it links the ubuntu-advantage-pro changelog to the ubuntu-advantage-tools changelog.

So by setting NO_PKG_MANGLE=1 we end up with a u-a-t binary package that is 20kb larger (all from the changelog) and an ubuntu-advantage-pro binary package that is also 20kb larger (also all from the changelog since it is neither truncated nor linked). ubuntu-advantage-pro is only installed on Cloud Pro images, though, so is less important than ubuntu-advantage-tools which is everywhere.

It feels a bit wrong to ship a 20kb changelog when its not necessary, but maybe it's okay.

I think we should get an SRU team decision to decide which is preferable:

A. NO_PKG_MANGLE=1 and 20kb u-a-t changelog for x, b, f, j, l
B. SRU the striptranslations.blacklist update to x, b, f, j, l